Authors CurseForge

Intro
This is an idea i've had for a while and that i touched on in my Dream Interface thread. I wanted to go into a bit more detail about the idea and perhaps spark some interest from a dev! IMO, this would be a pretty huge addon, allowing me to get rid of sct/scd, and hide my normal combat log 99% of the time, clearing up a significant amount of screen real estate.

Concept
The concept is simple; to display player and targeted enemy damage(to player) in a slim window for easy reading and quick self gratification. Player dmg to target is displayed left aligned, while target dmg to Player is displayed right aligned. At a glance the idea might seem a little impractical given the current mode of text alignment and my understanding of the way to get it to happen. If there is a simpler, more efficient way, please feel free to stab me in the face with your sharp words of correction.

The Frame
The frame consists of 3 windows for combat text output, all lying on top of eachother.

window 1
text alignment is set to left.
parses the log and displays player damage and prints blank lines for enemy damage and exp gain.

window 2
text alignment is set to right.
parses the log and displays enemy damage and prints blank lines for player damage and exp gain.

window 3
text alignment is set to center.
parses the log and displays exp gain, printing blank lines for player and target damage.

Damage Types and Skills; lost in simplicity?
I think with a well thought out user defined labeling/coloring model we could display all the information pretty well, in the event colors and symbols werent enough, perhaps small icons could be displayed. I've even included the idea for icon display in the mockup... :)

I tried to look into coding this myself, but when I opened some combat log addons for reference my eyes went crossed and i started rolling around on the floor drooling on myself.

I really like this idea! SCT is great but can be distracting with text flying all over the place. Combat logs are great, but as you said they take up too much screen space.

Very good idea.

Except adding the icons this shouldn't be too hard.
I already have an addon that does something like this and if i manage to find out how to create a window like the one you have i might be able to change it to this.

I called the addon SidebarCombatLog.
You can download it here if you want to try it out.
If there is enough request I might upload it to the svn.

Make only 3 frames, give the bottom 1 a back-ground, make the rest without a back-ground then follow Bant's suggestions?
Seems pretty easy (says the n00b).
nvm...

thanks for the replies :)

The problem with simplified hitsmode and andalia's sidebar is that if you have player and target damage seperated into 2 windows, you are missing a huge piece of information. The when! you can't scroll back through the log and pick apart the fight because its just a mush of numbers. speaking of scrolling, is it possible to scroll multiple windows at the same time? ie. use the mousewheel to scroll all 3 layers of combat text at once?

Quote from Bant »

speaking of scrolling, is it possible to scroll multiple windows at the same time? ie. use the mousewheel to scroll all 3 layers of combat text at once?

I'm pretty shure it is and I think tomorrow I will try to change my addon to your layout.
Atm I'm converting my current one to use a seperate frame instead of a chatframe.

awesome, looking forward to seeing your progress :)

You might be interested on the screenshot of Simple Combat Log on WoWI.

http://www.wowinterface.com/downloads/full3045.jpg

btw that SidebarCombatLog's code looks almost the same as Simple Combat Log in its very early version (before I adding all the customization). :p

Of course, with that big dewdrop menu function, SCL is almost 3X larger in terms of code size, so a simplifed version which doesn't have any customization at all, but does exactly what you want is cool too. (Simplified Simple Combat Log? :p)

nope. not interested in that screenshot :)

Quote from rophy »

You might be interested on the screenshot of Simple Combat Log on WoWI.

http://www.wowinterface.com/downloads/full3045.jpg

btw that SidebarCombatLog's code looks almost the same as Simple Combat Log in its very early version (before I adding all the customization). :p

Of course, with that big dewdrop menu function, SCL is almost 3X larger in terms of code size, so a simplifed version which doesn't have any customization at all, but does exactly what you want is cool too. (Simplified Simple Combat Log? :p)

I am interested in that. Looks quite nice.(I use SCL but can't get it to look like that with so many options... @_@)

I am going to add support for 'themes', which the first few you can expect are 'default', 'my damage (numbers only)', 'damage to me (numbers only)'.

May be the ability to customize, save and load theme sets too.

I planned to do that long time ago, but was really lazy to do it. I guess competition is a good thing.

Wow, sounds great. I will be able to get rid of SCT then(Clean, easy to read combat log that doesn't bunch up Player and Enemy attacks). ^___^

Can't wait, although I wouldn't mind having something just like Bant's idea... ;) Beggers can't be chosers, eh?

Yep, been using SCT 5.0 and SCTD 2.0 for as long as they have been on the SVN and I love them. ^_^ I have a great set up for them as well, but, well, I like the least amount of addons possible with the smallest memory footprint possible. So if I had an easy to read Combat Log like Rohpy posted, then I will use it. Seperating the Target's Damage and your damage makes reading it much easier, so quick glimpses can tell me what hit, thus eliminating the need for SCT. But I will most likely keep SCT as i lub it. Just hoping for a much cleaner Combat Log.

Edit:; BTW Rophy, how do you get it to show what attack hits for what. For example: Firebal: ~7~?

SCT is great in pvp, I simply cannot let my eyes away from my enemy and look at the combat log, so I use both too.

Excise: You can set the format to whatever you want with the drop down menu.

For example the default 'hit' format shown in SCL was : "[#source#] #skill# [#victim#] #amount##trailers#"

Changing it to : "#skill# : #amount#" will result in "Fireball: 700".

Rophy:
I also use scl since it is available and I like it.
I already tried to do my addon with scl in it's non-aced version and it wasn't possible.
I didn't recognize that this changed but I'm pretty sure that it's not possible to color the numbers according to if you are attacked or the enemy.
So I will need to continue my addon.
SCL isn't usable for me at all atm ^^
I'm getting many errors.